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# Posted 1:21 PM by Patrick Belton

SAMHAIN: A few words I gave two nights past, at a dinner my father and I gave in gratitude for friends who have kindly been there for us in past days. They are also applicable to friends in the blogosphere and readers, and so I reproduce them here.

Mum being a good Italian girl, this is her cena novendialis, at which the house is no longer considered funesta, the branches of yew and cypress are taken down from the door, a feast is held and the house is swept.

I, however, unlike her, am a British Isles Celt, and in the Celtic calendar, there is a day called Oiche Shamhna, which is tomorrow, the night of Samhain, when, one agricultural cycle having closed in harvest and the next not yet begun, two years are briefly married - albeit imperfectly, and in the opening it is possible to pass between the world of men and the world of the faeries, the Sidhe, the supernatural. So, a cena novendialis at the time of Samhain, for a Tuscan who married a Gael.

I am in all of your debt. Funerals - the word derives from the now-swept Roman Funesta - can be occasions for great outpourings of love. In one of the closing literary acts of the Torah, God Himself lovingly buries Moses, in the land of Moab, no man knowing the precise place. Funesta can occasion great outpourings of love; such is the case here.

I will not talk longer, this warm debt of gratitude to all of your loves acknowledged; food takes precedence in the Italianate rules of order. I shall however propose a toast, to absent friends.

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